


Wandering Witches

by TopHat



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Gen, Hero AU, Medieval AU, Powers are Magic, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-23 01:21:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23236744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TopHat/pseuds/TopHat
Summary: A Magic!Medieval!AU of Worm.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	Wandering Witches

A witch lived at the edge of Kinwik.  
  
Normally this was a good thing. Who wouldn’t want a being blessed with divine power to provide assistance? All the best towns benefited from the patronage of a witch, be that the Wandering Windmill maintained by a collection of tinkerers or the capitol farther north, where the man-star kept the worst of the conflicts contained. The local people accepted this divine right, as it mostly kept the wars away from the farmland and their children unlevied. All in all the Lord’s decision to take more direct actions on the world was generally agreed to be a good thing, and few complained about the advent of demigods.  
  
Except apparently sometimes the Lord made mistakes.  
  
The witch of Kinwik couldn’t create fantastic devices. She couldn’t transport a caravan from one side of a river to the next in just a few steps. She couldn’t even till the fields with a wave of her hand (or at least, not if you wanted any good soil left in them). The witch of Kinwik summoned storms of destruction, capable of annihilating barrows in moments, and while it was an awe-inspiring sight there was precious little destruction could build.  
  
With all that said, a bad witch was better than no witch. The villagers constructed a hut of dead branches and thatch, just close enough to the town proper to claim ownership, sent a simple child who didn’t know the risks to leave bread and meat at her doorstop, and said nothing when she came into town for her monthly black dress. The town elders turned a blind eye to the disappearance of her parents, woodsmen discussed the great gouges in nearby cliff faces only among themselves, and life in Kinwik went undisturbed for decades.  
  
And then one day a lanky boy with more knives than a butcher shop came into town.  
  


* * *

  
A trio of knocks rang from the door.  
  
It took a minute for Ashley to recognize the noise. The delivery of food had already come, and the mistimed sound of ringing wood felt as alien as the debris her storms left behind.  
  
After a few seconds, she let the tension drain from her shoulders. More than likely she’d imagined it.  
  
Another three knocks. “Hello? Is the witch of Kinwik home?”  
  
Ashley considered going back to bed. When she got visitors (a rare enough event), more often than not they were traveling knights, by birth rather than trade. These were men who’d grown fat on their father’s herds, demanding a demonstration of her storms in return for a few coins. They’d expect her to assume some over-the-top-yet-pathetic persona, go through a routine of prepared stunts, and then finish the whole thing up with a request to please come again. She could remember the smirks, lips yet untorn twisting into knots, retainers not more well-bred than she grinning at a chance to see the dancing bear, not quite the terror she was in her prime but for an old woman...  
  
Some would even ask her the price of a roll in the hay.  
  
Another series of knocks. “Please? I’d really rather wrap this up before things get dark.”  
  
Ashley sighed. So little to do in the spit of land known as Kinwik, and when something did come up it was a man-child begging for tricks. Best to be rid of him, and to be rid of him as soon as possible.  
  
She pushed herself up from the rocking chair which saw more use than her bed did, yesterday’s dress stuck to her by this morning’s dried sweat, joints aching where middle age had stiffened previously limber muscles. Ashley ran a burst of power through her hair to clean up, sending the strands into a violent dance and filling the room with thunder.  
  
Warning shot taken, Ashley took five steps from her bed to the entrance, pulled her door open, and growled, “What?”  
  
He wasn’t a knight. For one the boy was too thin, with cheekbones she could’ve cut herself on. His clothes, a tunic and breeches that wouldn't have looked out of place at the King’s court, were too ragged to belong to a man of means. A shadow of a beard clung to his face like the algae on top of a pond, cut back enough to be civilized and not an inch more. His skin was sallow; a bruise-dark bag hung under each eye, and travel-stained shoes that were more patch than boot wrapped each foot in strips of cloth and stitch, kept intact as much by miracle as by craftsmanship.  
  
The final signal of his peasantry was the knives. No good lord’s son would wander around without some signal of station, and while more than a dozen blades rested comfortably in fine leather sheaths none were longer than two hand spans.  
  
When the boy smiled he didn’t show any teeth, and his eyes remained dead as stones. “ I was wondering if I could—”  
  
“No.” And with that Ashley closed the door.  
  


* * *

  
After the first wave of rumors and anxious mutterings, the village of Kinwik remained much the same. The simple child still left food at the witch’s doorstep, the seamstress still made one plain black dress a month, the fields still needed harvesting, and an additional farmhand wouldn’t change that, no matter how odd.  
  
And he was odd. The boy was substantially better-armed than most fieldworkers, completed his labor more quickly than most of the other boys his age, and talked far more than any other three farmhands put together. His strangest habit was the persistent visits to the witch’s cottage, but after he came back intact the first five times the fear for his life faded, only to be replaced by curiosity. Curiosity, in turn, bred stories.  
  
Some said the witch had enchanted the boy to come to her, and rode him ragged every night. Some said the boy was biding his time, and would eventually slaughter the witch in her sleep and take her magic for his own. Some believed that the two were hatching a plot to gather the lesser witches in a coup d'etat which would lead to mass executions of the nobility and landlords, with her as the custodian of the throne while he played a figurehead ruler.  
  
A minority believed that the boy was simply trying to find more permanent lodging and the witch was continuing to refuse him, but they were generally believed to be delusional.  
  
The truth was that the boy’s eyes never changed, and that Ashley did not want to invite a snake into her bed. The boy altered his habits superficially, shifting his words, coming with gifts, once even sleeping on her porch, but at no point did he seek anything other than her company.  
  
Eventually, Ashley broke the routine.  
  


* * *

  
“If you tell me your name, you can stay.”  
  
The boy’s face froze, the ever-present smile more wooden than usual.  
  
“Elliard talks to himself,” Ashley continued, leaning against the doorframe. “Ramblings about what he had for breakfast, the pranks other children have played on him, which men visited his mother’s house, anything and everything he’s seen stirred together into a single, semi-coherent stew.”  
  
“He hasn’t said your name yet, and I don’t think it’s because he forgot it.”  
  
For a long moment, it looked like the boy was going to leave.  
  
Then he grimaced. It was a malicious expression, filled with spite and fury. Teeth, a little yellow and a lot crooked, were bared, and for the first time since Ashley had seen him something like emotion curling in his irises.  
  
“Fuck you, witch,” he spat, turning away to glare at the town.  
  
Ashley sighed. “If you harm one hair on his head I will kill you here and now.”  
  
This time the silence was thick enough to cut.  
  
“You have magic.” A statement, not a question.  
  
The boy’s hands twitched towards his knives.  
  
Ashley gave his hand a dismissive glare, then reestablished eye contact. “Apparently you haul the hay of a man twice your size. Either you have magic or more discipline than is immediately visible, and frankly speaking your dress is too atrocious for that.”  
  
“That’s a hell of an accusation,” the boy snapped, slim fingers wrapping around the hilt of a long, curved paring blade, still facing away from Ashley. “Maybe I’m just that good.”  
  
Ashley gave him one more appraising look, then shook her head and turned back into her home. “You aren’t.”  
  
The boy drew. Ashley spun around.  
  
Magic flared.  
  


* * *

  
After nearly dying, the boy revealed that he was a witch to the town. One with broken magic, just like their witch. Being able to cut at a distance made the harvest easier on him, yes, but not more than a horde of autonomous scarecrows, or a supply of simulacra, or any other number of spells. It was a selfish power, and while it was undeniably more valuable than a burst of pure catastrophe it still didn’t earn the boy any real respect.  
  
Unlike the older witch, the boy didn’t get a cottage. Times were leaner now, and after the initial buzz died down the village realized they couldn’t afford to keep two witches at the same time. The boy was upset, of course, but between an angry child with a knife and a woman personally known for her ability to rend the world with a gesture the villagers very reasonably concluded that they would prefer to humor his temper tantrum rather than risk being unmade. That, and when they suggested that he fight her for the cottage at the edge of the village the boy grasped at empty air by his side and went back to work with little fuss. Status quo maintained, things swiftly returned to normal.  
  
And just like normal, the harvest season eventually ended.  
  
In the warmer months, the walls of a barn and a nest of hay were plenty for a farmhand. The snow, however, could kill a man. This presented a predicament, as the villagers agreed that using magic shouldn’t be a death sentence come the winter, while also agreeing that not one of them wanted a witch sleeping under their roof. That was just good sense, as the magic-users brought misfortune and chaos wherever they went. As a result, they concluded that the boy would have to spend the frozen times with the Witch of Kinwik, and that the precise terms of that could be figured out between the two of them.  
  
Decision reached, the villagers sent the simple child to deliver the message while the boy was out on the fields. When Elliard came back alive they all heaved a sigh of relief and gave the matter no more thought, content to know that things would resolve themselves without further attention.  
  


* * *

  
On her way back home from a dress fitting, the frosted grass crunching lightly under her boots, Ashely found the new boy sulking on her doorstep.  
  
“Jack,” he said, glaring at the ground. “My name is Jack.”  
  
Ashley let the submission hang between them for a moment, then stepped forward. The boy got out of the way to let her open the door and step inside. After spitting on the ground (away from the witch), he followed in after.  
  
Jack then promptly stopped, dumbstruck.  
  
The pillars and rafters were made of wood, pitted and near-rotten with age. Attached to the wood by good, tarred twine were antlers, the white of freshly poured milk and larger than anything Jack had seen on a buck. Stone shards of an unfamiliar species of rock hung from each point, chains of dark stars sparkling in late-afternoon light, filling the room with illumination. The bed in the corner was large, with clean sheets and furs, and a heavy-looking trunk stood open, filled with clothes fit for a merchant’s wife. A rocking chair, with ferocious beasts carved into the surface, and the sparkling black stones inlaid where their eyes should’ve been, sat in front of a stone fireplace, adorned with a pair of plump-looking cushions.  
  
It was by far the greatest example of personal wealth Jack had seen in the town, and made more impressive for how it seemed that no one was aware of it.  
  
“That is your bed.” When Jack regained his senses, he saw that the witch was pointing to a bare square of wood, next to a trap door set into the wooden floor, also lined by black stone. “I’ll supply you with two blankets for the cold, but if you wish for anything more you will have to supply it yourself. This includes food, clothes, and firewood, the last of which I expect you to supply for me for the duration of your stay.”  
  
Jack looked at a bed, piled high with thick, heavy cloth, flanked by a stone fireplace and a chest packed with furs.  
  
He turned to the witch with a pleading gaze on his face.  
  
Ashley crossed her arms and looked back impassively. “As of now, the shed has precious few logs in it.”  
  
She jerked her head back towards a door on the side wall. “Fill it up before the first snowfall, and I will consider providing additional amenities.”  
  
Jack sighed and broke eye contact. “Where’s the hatchet?”  
  


* * *

  
Normally, sharpening a sword to a razor’s edge was a bad idea.  
  
This wasn’t to say that a dull sword was in any way desirable. Rather, it was a reflection of the unfortunate fact that killing one person with a sword usually wasn’t enough. Razors had thin edges, and while that was all well and good for shaving it was terrible for enduring the punishment of a sustained battle. Instead a balance was required, where an armorer would take a blade, find just the right angle to sharpen it at, and slowly grind out an edge that could crunch through the bones of a peasant without damaging its ability to cut through the next. Should an armorer be unavailable, a squire would take a whetstone to the offending edge, leading to a less-than-perfect-if-still-serviceable weapon.  
  
The youngest veteran in the village, Brom of Kinwik, didn’t know anything about this. He’d taken his sword off the corpse of a knight in the middle of a battle, seen the fifth son of a noble that had been placed in charge of him go down to an arrow in the stomach, and faded away into the edge of the woods. Since swords were next to useless for anything other than killing, it’d become little more than a prop for the stories he told about his glorious history as a duelist, each less credible than the last. He also didn’t know how to take care of it, and after the surface of the blade had too much rust to look pretty he’d returned the blade to its sheath and made do with his walking stick.  
  
It had still taken two week’s pay for the new boy to convince him to part with it, and even then he’d had misgivings. Officially the veteran was worried that he’d handed the witch a weapon he might use to cut their throats while they slept, but when he was alone with a tankard of beer he’d be frank with himself and admit he missed the air of respectability it gave him. It had been proof, however thin, that he’d fought for his village, and now that it was gone he’d become one more old man spouting tales of questionable honesty. The sword had been what separated him from the other doddering layabouts waiting to die, and now he had little left to do but wonder which day would be his last. Some days he fancied that perhaps the war wasn’t so bad, and that maybe he had one more fight left in him.  
  
Then the stumps of the fingers on his left hand would ache, and he’d shake the thought from his mind before going back to his beer.  
  
It was a long, cold winter, and Brom of Kinwik was buried during its second month. On their way back from the burial, the men who’d taken it upon themselves to dig up six feet of near-frozen earth came across a messenger dressed in a fine red coat bearing the King’s banner.  
  
“My name is Ser Robin,” he said. “I am a royal herald, acting with the authority of the crown. Where can I find the witch of Kinwik?”  
  


* * *

  
Once the herald had departed in a blur of crimson, Ashley went back to her rocking chair, sat down, and closed her eyes.  
  
War.  
  
“And you’re going to go back to sleep? Just like that?”  
  
She grimaced, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and lips growing slightly deeper. War and her lodger. “Yes. Now hush. Go back to your plaything.” He’d found a sword somehow, and was in the process of washing it in some absurd mixture that he claimed was supposed to remove the rust. Ashley had no idea what plans he had for the blade, but she also didn’t care enough about how the boy spent his wages to ask.  
  
Jack stopped talking.  
  
That, at least, he knew how to do.  
  
The sound of vinegar and sand on metal came back, and soon it was joined by the creak of wood on wood, the two melding with the gentle crackle of a small fire.  
  
For a while there was peace.  
  
The washing stopped. “When was the last time witches went to war?”  
  
Ashley sighed, and her chair slowly came to a halt.  
  
“Twenty years ago,” she said, tallying up the winters and feeling older for their legion.  
  
“You fought.”  
  
A statement, not a question. “Yes.”  
  
“Will you fight again?”  
  
Ashley nodded, opening her eyes to stare into the fire. “Yes.”  
  
Once, she would’ve paused, more fully considered the ramifications of the answer. Once, she had more variables in play, more people to consider. Once, the question of death had weight to it, and Ashley would’ve made a show of figuring out where to spend her life.  
  
Those times were many, many winters past.  
  
Jack got up. He walked over to the wood-shed, retrieved a log, and threw it on the fire, staring into the orange and red with a blank expression. After a few weeks of constant smiling, Ashley had told him to show what he felt with his face. This was his default now, and while it had earned him few friends in the fields Ashley personally found the honesty more palatable.  
  
Dissatisfied with the blaze, Jack picked out another log, dropped it next to the first, and wandered back to his bed. After a moment, he began poking at the fire with the sword, pushing the cinders around from ten paces away.  
  
Pointless when they had perfectly good pokers, but she would not begrudge him his fun.  
  
“The king called for all witches,” he said neutrally. “That includes me.”  
  
Ashley nodded, once more returning to her rocking. “He did.”  
  
Jack frowned, pulling at the hair on his chin. It had yet to grow into a proper beard, leaving him with a precious finger width of length before he had to begin again. “If I don’t show up, no one would know.”  
  
“I wouldn’t tell,” Ashley promised.  
  
Jack considered the sword, then sheathed it, apparently content with the fire. After stripping out of his shirt, he lay down on a fur, pulled his two blankets over himself, and turned to face the wall. It was a sign that he’d made up his mind, and Ashley couldn’t bring herself to care about what that meant.  
  
Instead, she stared into the flames, thinking.  
  
The fire burned down, and Ashley began to drift off.  
  
“What time do we head out?”  
  
The words pierced her daze for just long enough to register. Ashley inhaled, held the breath, and let it out.  
  
“Sunrise.”  
  


* * *

  
Ser Renick hated what witches had done to warfare.  
  
He wasn’t alone in that. It was a generally agreed-upon truth among the educated and well-born that anything which could cut down a generation of chivalry in minutes was an abomination, and that this qualification for being an affront to the glory of combat extended to both conventional weaponry and magic. To hell with trebuchets, catapults, and boiling oil, the only thing which qualified as actual battle took place on a level field between two armies of roughly equivalent size with similar compositions, and only after _casus belli_ had been thoroughly established by the Church. Frankly speaking, he didn’t even feel comfortable with the arbalests that had slowly been trickling down through the ranks, even if the knowledge that Armstrong had an entire platoon outfitted with the weapons made him green with envy.  
  
“We have just more than one hundred and fifty witches under our banners, your majesty,” Lady Emily said, staring across the great oak table at the King. If Renick were to be honest, he also felt that taking orders from a woman was an affront to the glory of combat. The fact that Lady Emily had a checkered past didn’t make the position under her any easier to swallow, nor did her excessively manish appearance endear her to anyone he’d ever talked to. On the other hand, defying the King had been decreed to be a greater sin, and if his Lord decided that Renick would now attend to the troops naked he would swallow his pride and follow orders.  
  
“Excellent work, Lady Emily.” The King nodded once, eyes focused on the battle map as he waved his hand. Pieces moved as invisible forces struck them, different colors forming haphazard patterns across the land. “I’ve flown over our enemies forces, noting the locations of their primary encampments. My vision is not infallible, however, and the initial volley I unleashed was negated through some magic. Are there any diviners among those you’ve summoned here?”  
  
Piggot bowed. “As many as a dozen. I’ll bring them to the war room now.”  
  
That was Renick’s cue. He bowed as well, lower than Piggot had, and took his leave of the room.  
  
Once the heavy wooden doors were closed behind him, the tension left his shoulders. Renick gave himself a moment to feel the weight of his armor, sagging forward and pinching the bridge of his eyebrows.  
  
“Wolf-fucking horseballs,” he said.  
  
The King didn’t know how terrifying he was. That, or he knew exactly how terrifying he was, then acted as if he didn’t. The man had gathered intelligence in minutes which would’ve taken the best rangers Renick knew weeks, and had only refrained from wiping out the army in its entirety because of another witch. A storm of divine proportions, held at bay through luck on the army’s part and caution on the storm’s behalf.  
  
That wasn’t even the scariest part. If he wanted to, King Starr could’ve simply flown over the channel, razed the offending country’s royal palace to the ground, then been back in time for dinner. No campaign, no siege, no graceful surrender, no honor.  
  
Just the end of a line of royalty.  
  
Now he was to go meet a group of affronts against nature, select those who could know things they shouldn’t, and ask them to plan the systematic annihilation of the invading army. He would do it because to disobey would be to go against God and country, and Renick put both above his own scruples. He would follow the orders of his Lady, who had once fought a witch with her bare hands when a witch’s machines broke. He would serve his homeland, and he would raise his sons and daughters to obey its law, pay their tithes, and instruct them on how civilized nobility behaved.  
  
Renick stood up straight, threw his shoulders back, and began the walk to the encampment of witches, lips pressed into a hard line, and prepared himself for the day ahead.  
  
He would do all of these things because he was a God-fearing man who cared about the continued survival of his line and that of his country, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.  
  


* * *

  
Jack stared into the pitted flat of his blade, searching for his reflection. All he saw was faded grey metal, but it was better than engaging in conversation with the witches around him.  
  
“When do you think we’re going to get some action?” Hookwolf growled, punctuating the words with the screech of metal on metal as he paced in front of the nightmarish woods they’d been stationed at. Currently he was the size of a horse, but the rumors Jack had heard said he could grow much, much bigger. “I’m getting bored, what with all this waiting.”  
  
A woman who had introduced herself as Night Hag clucked her tongue and looked down disdainfully from where she sat mid-way up a tree on a branch far too thin to support her weight, her impossibly black dress somehow still decent despite the angle. “I don’t know. I enjoy the quiet. It gives me time to find my taste for the land.”  
  
“I could give you a taste for something,” Skinslip said, guffawing crudely at his own joke and holding up a single corpulent hand towards Hookwolf. When the larger witch walked by him without so much as a sideways glance, Skinslip dropped his arm and turned to Jack. “Come on boy, you get it right? Or have you been putting off that visit to the milkmaid’s room?”  
  
“If you continue to fill the air with such filth, I will make you fight without an arm,” Ashley said, quiet and cold as the space between stars.  
  
Skinslip shut up after that.  
  
Jack warily examined Ashley out of the corner of his eye. They’d journeyed to the king’s castle on the back of a pair of barn horses, only marginally faster than walking, and promptly been given better mounts with which to reach the front lines.  
  
Along the way, Ashley had slowly faded away, replaced by someone that Jack did not know.  
  
This woman wore armor. Boiled black leather, strong as the mail underneath it, with a helm of metal and black stone. She walked in boots, not slippers, that _clicked_ on the cobblestones of the capital’s streets. Grown men, who could shatter stone with their voices or swell to the size of towers, made room for her when she walked by, and seemed glad to do so. When she spoke, a more frequent occasion than in the village, the other witches listened, and those that didn’t stop talking were quickly shushed by their seniors. Near-legends, separate from myth only because Jack saw their faces, acknowledged her presence with firm nods and wary eyes.  
  
That attention sometimes drifted to Jack, and when it did he felt like a hare before the wolves.  
  
“Over there! On the horizon!”  
  
Jack jumped to his feet, fingers tightening around the handle of his sword.  
  
For a second, he couldn’t see anything.  
  
Then something flashed. Metal, brightly polished. More glints appeared on the horizon. Spears. Then he saw helmets, conical and uniform, indistinguishable toy soldiers slowly being marched over the crest of the hill.  
  
Unlike toy soldiers, they kept coming.  
  
When he’d seen the witch’s encampment, a mile outside the city’s gates, he been in awe of the raw number of people. Who knew there’d been more than a hundred magic users in the kingdom? The city’s sheer density hadn’t been any less staggering, and the few opportunities he’d had to wander around without supervision had convinced him that he wanted to live there. The scent of people, sweaty and working, fought with freshly baked goods for dominance in his nose, a skirmish between angry haggling and musicians of varying talents waged in his ear, and his eyes had been assaulted by the variety. The city had agreed with Jack, and he looked forward to a long and mutually beneficial relationship with it.  
  
These troops did not feel like the city.  
  
Their movements were regular. Even. Nearly mechanical. There was none of the half-furious, half-hopeful chaos of the streets of the king’s city. There was no beating heart to their motions, no sense of urgency. Just calm, efficient motion, as if they had a task to do and didn’t particularly care about the outcome.  
  
He’d have used the word bored, but the spears refused to let him.  
  
Jack flinched when someone passed his side, and tensed further when he saw that it’d been the Witch of Kinwik.  
  
“Prepare for battle.”  
  
Skinslip’s folds of flesh loosened, the weights on his back falling to the ground with the dead sound of metal on soil, becoming less man and more amalgam. A shiver-inducing laugh echoed out above Jack, the shadows growing deeper, the grass longer, and nightmarish brambles forced their cruel, cork-screwed way out of the ground, thick as his wrists and coiling like serpents. The sounds of hundreds of knives sharpening against one another tore at his ears, and a shadow passed over Jack when the now bear-sized Hookwolf laughed, standing on his hind legs.  
  
“How much do you know about magic, boy?” he rumbled, the amusement as pleasant as a grindstone. One hand, a tangle of spurs and blades, reached out. “What say you and I cast a spell?”  
  
Jack swallowed. Twice. He looked for Night Hag, who’d disappeared from her perch.  
  
A hand tapped his shoulder and it took all his will not to scream.  
  
“Now the fun starts,” Night Hag whispered, eyes locked on the soldiers at the crest of the hill. She had fused herself to the tree trunk, with only her upper torso sticking out. She was smiling, an expression that only served to make Jack’s heart beat faster.  
  
He looked to Skinslip, who had begun swinging his weights in hypnotic circles and singing.  
  
 _“Hey ho, fire to the roof, fire to the floor, spread the fire more! Wait! No! Not that one! That one’s mine, that one’s yours, that one’s bound for distant shores! Hey ho, load it up, send it back, and enjoy a little sack! Hey ho, a raider’s life for me!”_  
  
Finally, he turned to Ashley. She stood conspicuously still, an eldritch pillar of sparkling black armor and lifeless white, her back to Jack.  
  
“Ash?” he asked.  
  
She glanced over her shoulder, eyes empty pools of black.  
  
“See what you can do.”  
  
Jack closed his eyes, put his hand on Hookwolf’s metal, and let his magic go.  
  


* * *

  
Jack had gone back to smiling.  
  
Those smiles weren’t fake, though. Ashley figured that part of that was regular contact with other young men, who either had magic or the blessing of good breeding and coin. They weren't scared of him like the folks in the village were, and she’d even heard him laughing a few times, drinking golden beer under the noonday sun in a parade celebrating the deaths of thousands.  
  
When she’d brought that up Jack’s smile had died, and he’d excused himself after another few moments of silence.  
  
Ashley sighed, the slow, even pace of the bay horse lightly agitating the residual pain of surgery. She’d pushed herself, flying around like she was a girl of twenty, and the cost of doing that was aching joints. The king’s chirurgeon had fixed her up, pulled her muscles and skin to a childish tightness, filled her bones with foreign liquids to give them weight long since lost, and purged what miscellaneous filth or flaws that had built up over time.  
  
When she’d looked in a mirror, it had been like looking back in time.  
  
Jack had noticed too. He’d begun to act more chivalrously, awkwardly holding open doors she’d normally walk through first and pulling chairs out too far down the table, and when a lesser witch had made a bawdy joke took it upon himself to try and defend her honor.  
  
Ashley snorted, tightening a saddle strap. Jack had tried to challenge someone to a duel over her. As if one battle made him an arbiter of life and death, one campaign against woefully underprepared a respected duelist, one shared moment a couple.  
  
That duel had been when she started packing her bags. The armor back in its trunk, the uncomfortable war boots with it, replaced by a black dress and slippers. She traded in the war horse for more sedate creature, used to long roads and heavy loads. She took her pay from the king’s treasurer, informed his chamberlain of the state of affairs in Kinwik, and cancelled her room at the inn.  
  
She hadn’t intended on saying goodbye, but when she ran into Jack waiting just outside the southern gate she found herself slowing her horse to a walk, then a stop.  
  
The two of them were alone on the road, and, after a moment, she broke the silence.  
  
“I don’t care for this city,” she said bluntly. “I don’t care for the people, I don’t care for the power plays, and I don’t care for its current ruler. I don’t care for the stench of horse shit wafting into my nose every step, the absurd price of anything and everything, or what too much company does to otherwise sensible people.”  
  
“I like it,” Jack said. “I like food that tastes like something other than oats. I like how there’s always something to do, something new on the side streets. I like how I feel more alive in one week here than I have in a month of wandering through the woods in Kinwik, and I like running towards the next new thing.”  
  
She nodded. “And you like the company.”  
  
Jack blushed and looked to the side.  
  
Ashley sighed. “It has been a while but yes, I do remember the pleasure of being less alone.”  
  
“The court is a pit of vipers,” she said, shifting topics. “It’s all about appearances. About faces. About currying favor, undercutting the people around you, and clawing for every scrap of power you can. Magic is the least important part of it, and everyone involved knows three ways to destroy you without harming a hair on your head.”  
  
“And I think I’d rather chance that pit of vipers than endure another year in Kinwik.”  
  
Ashley looked to the sky. A pair of hawks were circling one another, not quite mating, not quite fighting.  
  
“I hate the banality. I hate the barely-there aggression. I hate how everyone knows everyone else’s name, business, and feels the need to comment on it. I hate the labor, I hate how anything more than two miles away may as well not exist, and I hate the sight of the place.” The leather handle on Jack’s new sword creaked, and his voice took a steel tone. “At least here earning my bed and bread doesn’t feel like being a walking corpse.”  
  
“If that’s how you truly feel,” she said noncommittally.  
  
“It is.”  
  
The hawks flew away.  
  
When Ashley looked down Jack’s shoulders had slumped, his eyes fixed firmly on her stirrup.  
  
“I’ll visit,” he said limply.  
  
Ashley’s lips twitched and she turned away.  
  
A statement, not a question.


End file.
